Milestone XProtect Express 2014 - Manual (Page 123)

Milestone XProtect ® Express 2014 Administrator's Manual
www.milestonesys.com 123 Advanced configuration
About archiving audio
If you have enabled an audio source (for example, a microphone) on a hardware device, audio
recordings are archived together with video recordings from the camera attached to the hardware
device. If the hardware device is a video encoder with several channels, audio is archived with the
camera on channel 1. When you have enabled an audio source, the system records audio to the
associated camera’s database. This affects the database’s capacity for storing video. You may,
therefore, want to use scheduled archiving more frequently if you record audio and video than if you
only record video.
Storage capacity required for archiving
The storage capacity required for archiving depends entirely on the amount of recordings you plan to
keep, and on how long you want to keep them (retention time). Some organizations want to keep
archived recordings from a large number of cameras for several months or years. Other organizations
may only want to archive recordings from one or two cameras, and they may want to keep their
archives for much shorter periods of time.
You should always first consider the storage capacity of the local drive containing the default archiving
directory to which archived recordings are always moved, even though they may immediately after be
moved to an archiving location on another drive. Basically, the capacity of the local drive should be at
least twice the size required for storing the databases of all cameras.
When you archive, XProtect Express automatically checks that space required for the data to be
archived plus 1 GB of free disk space per camera is available at the archiving location. If not, the
archive location's oldest data from the camera in question is deleted until there is sufficient free space
for the new data to be archived.
When you estimate storage capacity required for archiving, consider your organization's needs, then
plan for worst case rather than best case scenarios.
Tip: The Storage Calculator in the Support section of the Milestone website can help you determine
the storage capacity required for your surveillance system.
About archiving schedules
There are two ways in which to configure archiving schedules:

While you configure your cameras through the Configure Video and Recording wizard (see
"Configure storage wizard" on page 44), in which case you configure your archiving schedule
on the wizard's Drive selection page.

As part of the general Scheduling and Archiving properties: Expand Advanced Configuration,
right-click Scheduling and Archiving, select Properties, select Archiving in the dialog, and
specify relevant properties (see "Archiving" on page 128).
Automatic response if running out of disk space
If your system runs of disk space while archiving, you can set up an automatic response. Two
scenarios can occur, depending on whether the camera database drive is different from, or identical
to, the archiving drive: